August 13th, 2019 by Adam Armstrong

VMware Announces vSAN 6.7 Update 3

Today VMware Inc. announced the upcoming update to vSAN 6.7, update 3. The update delivers container-ready infrastructure to vSAN. VMware also announced the upcoming release of vSAN Enterprise Plus Edition, a bundle of vSAN Enterprise and vRealize Operations Advanced licenses.

Applications are changing. A large driving force of this change is microservices and the predominant deployment method for them, containers. While containers were originally designed for stateless applications, the need for storage persistence, has changed how containers are used. With this in mind, VMware has added container-ready infrastructure to the latest update to vSAN 6.7.

Update 3 enables customers that leverage containers to deliver high velocity scaling, multi-cloud portability and unified management. VMware states that through this update, users can unify their virtual machine and container-based compute and storage management using familiar tools and processes, including granular visibility into container volumes. Update 3 also allows users to scale at the pace of containers with the support of all key storage API objects within Kubernetes. Container persistent storage works with any vSphere datastore.

VMware will also be rolling out a vSAN Enterprise Plus Edition, a bundle of vSAN Enterprise and vRealize Operations Advanced licenses. Key benefits of vSAN Enterprise Plus Edition include:

Stretched clusters with local protection – Create a robust stretched cluster with site and local protection between two geographically separate sites, synchronously replicating data between sites. It enables enterprise-level availability for 50% lower costs than the leading traditional solution.

vSAN Encryption – Native to vSAN, vSAN Encryption provides data-at-rest security at the cluster level and supports all vSAN features, including space efficiency features like deduplication and compression. Enabled with a few clicks, vSAN Encryption is built for compliance requirements and offers simple key management with support for all KMIP compliant key managers, such as CloudLink, Hytrust, SafeNet, Thales, and Vormetric. vSAN Encryption is FIPS 140-2 validated, meeting stringent U.S. federal government standards.